How To Set Social Media Goals (and reach them)
To create a successful social media strategy, it's important to set specific goals. This allows you to measure the success of your efforts and determine the return on investment (ROI). Without clear objectives, it can be difficult to assess the effectiveness of your strategy.
Many businesses recognise the potential value of social media marketing, but may not fully understand its true worth. This is where setting specific goals becomes important. By establishing clear objectives, companies can better understand the value that social media brings to their brand.
Why are social media goals important?
Social media goals are crucial for a number of reasons. Firstly, they help you prioritise tasks and increase the likelihood of success. Having goals also helps you track your progress and make adjustments as needed. This allows you to see what's working and what isn't, and make changes to your strategy to improve your results.
Well-made social media marketing goals will also help you:
Manage your budget
Focus your efforts
Assess your marketings ROI
Adjust your strategy
Align your social media activity with your broader business objectives.
The social media goals you set should always reflect your specific business needs. Below are some examples of common social media goals and the metrics you can use to measure their success.
increase brand awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are familiar with your brand and its products or services. Building brand awareness is important, particularly in the early stages of your brand growth.
You can measure brand awareness on social media with metrics like:
- Post Reach: How many people have seen a post since it went live?
- Track mentions and hashtags: By tracking mentions of your brand and the hashtags you
use, you can see how many people are talking about your brand on social media.
- Monitor engagement: Engagement is the number of likes, comments, and shares that your posts receive.
- Audience growth: How many followers you gained over a time period.
- Use social media analytics tools: Many social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools that can help you track your brand's performance.Increase Website Traffic
Social media marketing goals aren’t limited to actions that take place on social platforms. Your website is a key player in your social media strategy and these are the metrics you should be keeping an eye on.
Traffic to your site. How much traffic is your website getting from social media platforms, which social media platforms are performing better at funnelling to your website.
Bounce Rates: The percentage of users that come to your website only to leave without taking any action
3. increase sales or conversions
Depending on your specific business goals, you can measure conversion in several ways:
Conversion rate: The number of visitors who, after clicking on a link in your post, take action on a page divided by that page’s total visitors.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): How often people click on the call-to-action link in your post.
Social media conversion rate: The percentage of total conversions from social media.
Bounce rate: The percentage of users that click on one of your links only to leave without taking any action.
4. Lead generation
Perhaps your goal isn’t to generate sales, and instead it is to generate leads and interest in your product or service. Lead-generating campaigns yield any information that helps you follow up with a social media user. That includes names, email addresses, occupations, employers, or other information they share.
This could be through downloads of your gated content – “How many people visited from social media and downloaded your gated content?” or Participation – “How many people participated in your social media contest or events and shared their information with you?”
5. build a community around your brand
Over the last couple of years, there has been a rise in a rise in the number of closed communities and chats that brands have been focusing on. The types of goals you want to set for these communities may feel very different to your overall fan / follower growth goals and of course, the type of community you choose to build will have an effect on the metrics you choose to measure success by.
- For Facebook groups it could be determined by the number of post likes and comments.
- For Slack communities, it could be the number of daily active users.
6. Social CUstomer Service
Having a good customer service on social media can help to increase revenue, customer satisfaction score, and retention. But only one in five (21%) organisations surveyed by Buffer said that they use social media for customer support.
The trend of people turning to social media for customer support will likely continue, and we think there’s still a huge opportunity for businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors with great social media customer service.
Metrics to measure your social customer service effectiveness:
Number of support questions – “Is there a demand for social media customer support for your company?”
Response time – “How fast are you getting back to your customers?”
Customer Satisfaction Score – “How satisfied are your customers with your service?”
What are your social media goals?
With the social media landscape moving so quickly, new goals and ways to measure success are constantly emerging and we love hearing about the goals you are currently focused on. As always, if you need any help with determining what your social media goals should be, reach out and we can always help!